Never let it be said that Photography courses are full of techno geeks droning on about how much better their camera is compared to the lesser spotted Nikon from the safety of a classroom! A See Life Through The Lens Landscape Photography Course can, quite literally, make the biggest splash in your understanding of photography and how to get the best out of your camera as Penny and Vicky found out down in Portland last weekend!

I have met both Vicky and Penny before on different See Life courses and was looking forward to a weekend of great locations with these two very keen and accomplished photographers. The thing about getting amazing landscape images is you can’t do it from the safety of your armchair and if the conditions aren’t great all the more reason to get out and find a location that suits the weather and capture the drama. After photographing Portland Bill on our first dawn shoot both Vicky and Penny were keen to return the following morning to shoot more of this amazing coastline. As I try and work around the participants’ requests where ever possible, I was delighted to be going back to one of my favourite locations twice on one trip!

On our first morning at Portland we had a howling wind to contend with along with a lovely sky and although the wind had dropped on our second shoot here we were faced with immense crashing waves that had been stirred up by the previous day’s South Easterly winds. The sky was again fantastic and this time we concentrated on capturing the amazing water movement and communicating how wild the conditions were… Unfortuantely both Vicky and I found out first hand about the wild conditions, this is a shot Penny managed to capture of Vicky with one of the huge waves sneaking up on her!

Thanks for letting me share the image ladies and thank goodness no one captured the moment I got swamped whilst checking out another great composition from where we were based – all credit to Penny, despite the soaking I got she was still up for using the spot and captured a great image of Portland Bill. This is my version of the Bill bathed in golden light.

In stark contrast we had a couple of very calm dusk shoots in and around Portland where we were concentrating on black and white images and bringing out feelings of calm and peace, and during the day we not only visited zombie beach, covered in seaweed that felt like dead bodies *shudder* where we spent our time understanding and practising using 10 stop filters to make a variety of images but we also spent some time around the historic quay concentrating on composition and seeing images in the photo challenge I set them both. To see some of Penny and Vicky’s images, please visit the CLIENT GALLERY and to hear what they had to say on the weekend please visit the TESTIMONIALS page.

Two of my other favourite images from the weekend

To find out more about a See Life Through The Lens Landscape Photography Workshop please give me a call on 07866 440740 or 01794 516821… Remember to bring your waterproofs!

I was after something new last week and set myself a challenge to find and photograph something out of the ordinary in the ordinary environment. I wanted to see if I could photograph parts of the town that could be interpreted as letters without actually photographing letters and so I headed towards the Western Esplanade in Southampton, somewhere I have never really looked around despite living in nearby Romsey for a number of years, to begin my challenge.

Immediately plenty of “I”s popped out at me, signposts, bollards and obvious straight lines but I wanted to be more creative and as I walked around I started to see letters everywhere! Some more obvious that others like the S shape of metal that had been hammered into a post and the letter J in a simple bend of a drainpipe. After only a couple of hours I had almost collected the whole alphabet apart from the elusive letter “Z”… If you know of a Z in the environment please let me know by emailing me helen@seelifethroughthelens.com so I can add it to my collection, until then I will be out and about looking for it myself!!

As I am so pleased with my results I decided to offer them to you as personalised gifts including your name in a frame, keyrings and greetings cards. For more information please visit my SPECIALS Page. For a sample of your name or the name of a loved one please drop me an email to helen@seelifethroughthelens.com